We're at less than 10 days until Christmas, and many people have yet to see the arrival of gifts they ordered well before the window for delivery in time.

According to The Washington Post, an unprecedented holiday shopping season is overwhelming the U.S. Postal Service, causing sort of a holiday shipping gridlock they've never had to deal with before.

FedEx and UPS have cut off delivery for certain retailers to help with their own gridlock problems, but that only forces those packages to the USPS. The Post says postal employees are putting in extraordinary overtime hours, which is only depleting morale more.


A letter carrier in Detroit said that he and his co-workers were scheduled for two eight-hour routes every day last week to help catch up backlogged deliveries.

According to payroll data, the first two weeks of December saw one of every five hours worked within the agency being overtime.

“We thank our customers for their continued support, and we are committed to making sure gifts and cards are delivered on time to celebrate the holidays,” USPS Chief Retail and Delivery Officer Kristin Seaver said in a news release issued Monday. “We continue to flex our network including making sure the right equipment is available to sort, process and deliver a historic volume of mail and packages this holiday season.”

It wasn't that USPS didn't see the rush coming. They urged everyone to start shopping as early as possible, hired 50,000 seasonal workers, added transportation and package tracking, and expanded Sunday deliveries in areas with high volume.

The backup is running all mail behind, not just packages.

“All priority mail is now running one-to-two weeks behind, but the post office won’t admit that. They won’t tell anybody anything. … And this isn’t just here in Indiana. It’s the entire country,” one of the supervisors at an Indiana post office said.

Read more at KIRO

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